'This is My Battle': Lee Ozmint

When asking football coaches who or what inspired them and motivated them to pursue the career that they are undertaking, you will probably come across a wide variety of different answers.

For some it’s their father or mother. For others, it might be their faith or friends. Other might have simply developed a love of the game on their own.

For former Alabama football defensive back Lee Ozmint, two factors inspired him to become a high school football coach: his faith and former Crimson Tide coach Bill Curry.

“Bill Curry, I just think the world of him as a human being because he’s a good coach but he is a great man,” Ozmint said. “To me that’s a high compliment.”

Growing up in Anderson, S.C., Ozmint didn’t start playing football until his junior year at T. L. Hanna High School in 1984. Up until that time, basketball was his primary sport.

“I thought basketball was the end-all, save-all,” Ozmint said. “Then I started playing football and it really opened some doors.”

Ozmint performed well at T. L. Hanna, playing primarily as a wide receiver. His skills soon caught the attention of many schools across the southeast, including Georgia and Clemson. However, he ultimately decided that Tuscaloosa and the University of Alabama was where he wanted to go.

Ozmint joined coach Ray Perkins and the Crimson Tide but admits that at the time he didn’t feel lucky to just be included on the team. In his first season, he was moved over to tight end, and then again to safety.

“I was lucky to sign with Alabama,” Ozmint laughed. “I was probably one of the afterthoughts. It was a great class.”

After the 1986 season, Perkins left Alabama to become the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the NFL. It was soon afterward that Curry was hired to replace Perkins as the new head coach of the Crimson Tide.

Above all else, it was Curry’s relationship style of coaching that attracted Ozmint to his style and manner.

“Back then coach Curry was trying to be a relationship coach when that was just not done,” Ozmint said. “Back in the late 80s and early 90s that was just not done. I think there was a lot of misunderstanding back in those years with coach Curry because of that. He was a relational coach — wanted to be at least — and in some ways the culture just wouldn’t let him.”

During Curry’s first summer in Tuscaloosa, he called Ozmint with a favor to ask. Curry was interested in a former teammate of Ozmint’s at T. L. Hanna, Preston Jones. Curry was flying into Anderson for a recruiting visit and asked that Ozmint drive him to the school.

The trip didn’t go exactly as planned.

“I drove him to the school and he got out and I stayed parked in the parking lot because he said ‘you can’t go in with me so just stay out here’, so I stayed out there,” Ozmint recalled. “Well, a bus backed into me and almost totaled my car and I couldn’t get out of the way because I was sandwiched between two buses. He came out after meeting with Preston and he said ‘man what in world have you done?’ I said ‘coach, I didn’t do anything. I just sat here’.”

Despite the setback, Ozmint looks back upon Curry’s trip with fondness.

“I drove him to Hart County, Georgia because he was recruiting somebody else there and we talked about a lot of things,” Ozmint said. “It was good to talk to a coach and coach that that would talk to you and not at you. He was one of those.”

Three seasons and an SEC championship later, Ozmint graduated from Alabama with a degree in English. He then moved on to law school at Alabama, where he earned his juris doctorate.

After two years of working in a law office in Tuscaloosa, Ozmint and his wife, Leigh Ozmint, relocated to a different law practice in Gadsden. Ozmint would eventually make partner at the firm but felt unfulfilled.

“The whole time I was there I felt that something was missing,” Ozmint said. “I didn’t hate the practice of law but I didn’t feel that I was bringing God pleasure doing it because He had created me to do something else and I didn’t know what.”

One day while heading to the local YMCA to play some basketball, Ozmint reached a low point. Feeling unsatisfied and unfulfilled with his current career, Ozmint reached out to God for guidance while sitting in his car in the gym’s parking lot.

“I sat there and I said ‘God tell me what you want me to do because this isn’t it’,” Ozmint said. “Clearly, not in an audible voice — I’ve never heard the voice of God but it was as close to a voice as I’ve heard — it said ‘why would I give you something new if you won’t excel in what I’ve already given you?’ The pity parade was over and I got to work.

“I worked hard and about two years after that I found out a program where you could teach under an emergency certificate and get your teacher’s certificate while you were teaching.”

Soon afterwards, Ozmint began teaching English in Gadsden as well as serving as a coach for the football team. The rest is history, as two decades and four coaching jobs later, Ozmint is now the head coach at Arab High School.

Ozmint’s passion for high school football rings true in his voice when speaking on the subject.

“I think the last bastion of true football is going to be high school football and college football,” Ozmint said. “I played on Saturdays and I loved it. Don’t get me wrong, I love Alabama football and I still love everything that it’s done for me. It had a huge role in making me the person that I am today. But as far as football is concerned to me, college football doesn’t hold a candle to high school. It doesn’t hold a candle to Friday night. There’s still something special about Friday night.”

Today, Ozmint gets great fulfillment and enjoys his job as a coach. His favorite part of the job? Mentoring young men.

“I love seeing a kid that’s so hopeless and clueless and just so full of himself and playing a sport for all the wrong reasons and I just love seeing that light come on,” Ozmint said. “I love seeing that light come on. I love seeing them learn what accountability means and I love seeing when they understand.”

Lee currently resides in Arab with his wife. The couple have been married since the early 1990s and have two sons, Thomas and Pace.

Regarding Pace playing as a wide receiver for Auburn from 2016-2019, Lee Ozmint chuckled and insisted that he remained a supportive father.

After years of searching, Ozmint is finally happy and content and feels that he is right where he belongs.

“I love it,” Ozmint said. “I love what I do. There’s challenges and there’s days where it really does stink, it really does suck. It’s like a bucket of suck some days. But I know this is my fight. This is my battle. This is what God has created me to do and there’s a lot of comfort in that.”